Three members of the Carroll School of Management’s top-ranked finance department won coveted awards for academic papers at the Jan. 3–5 annual meeting of the American Finance Association, in San Diego—another notch in the School’s growing reputation as a leading management research institution.
The Carroll School has consistently ranked among the top 20 business schools worldwide for faculty research, according to authoritative annual surveys compiled by the Financial Times. In addition, the finance department registered at #11 in U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Undergraduate Finance Programs” for this academic year.
The latest faculty honors went to David H. Solomon, Andrey Malenko, and Nadya Malenko, for articles appearing last year in The Journal of Finance, published by the American Finance Association. All three are associate professors of finance at the Carroll School, with Nadya Malenko serving as the Giuriceo Family Faculty Fellow and Solomon serving as the David J. Mastrocola Faculty Fellow.
Solomon did the best among winners of the Dimensional Fund Advisors Prizes, awarded annually for the top three Journal of Finance papers in any area of research other than corporate finance. Together with co-author Samuel M. Hartzmark of the University of Chicago, he won first prize for “The Dividend Disconnect,” which finds that investors and analysts tend to look at dividends and capital gains as “disconnected attributes,” not fully realizing that dividends will often result in lower share prices.
At the same time, the Malenkos scored one of the association’s three Brattle Group Prizes in Corporate Finance. They won a Distinguished Paper award for their article, “Proxy Advisory Firms: The Economics of Selling Information to Voters,” which looks at the increasingly heavy influence of firms that advise shareholders on proxy votes, and presents a framework for evaluating the quality of corporate decision-making that stems from such advice.
The prize for best paper in both categories is $25,000, while the Distinguished Paper awards net $10,000 each.
“The Journal of Finance is the premier journal of our field, and it is remarkable for one school to have representation in both the corporate finance and non-corporate-finance prizes,” said department chair Ronnie Sadka, who is also the Carroll School’s senior associate dean for faculty and the Seidner Family Faculty Fellow. “This is an outstanding achievement for our faculty and our department.”
Meanwhile, Professor Jeffrey Pontiff’s 2016 article in The Journal of Finance (“Does Academic Research Destroy Stock Return Predictability?”) has been hovering at the top of the journal’s prominent list of its 25 most-cited articles over the past five years. Pontiff holds the James F. Cleary Chair in Finance at the Carroll School.
Andy Boynton, John and Linda Powers Family Dean of the Carroll School, noted that the finance department has helped lead the way toward the School’s renown for peer-reviewed research.
“We’ve built a unique finance department at the Carroll School, and in general, we’ve been building a vibrant research culture across the departments, investing heavily in our faculty and their scholarly endeavors,” he said. “These awards from the American Finance Association are just the latest sign.”